The CALL Nominations and Elections Committee had a very successful year. We were able to find nominees for all of the open positions: Vice President/President-elect, Treasurer, and Director. We were probably a month behind last year’s schedule with our call for nominees, but this did not seem to affect the nomination process. Despite our good luck with a late call for nominations, I think future Nominations and Elections Committee chairs should let the call for nominations start early and go long.
The election went smoothly with help from Chris Siwa at AALL. There were some initial issues with incorrect passwords, but it was easy to fix. Our committee was very lucky to have most of its work done before the coronavirus pandemic hit. We contacted all of the nominees on their cell phones from home.
One thing our committee did not get a chance to do was revise the election timeline. As I noted above, the call for nominations was a little bit later than usual and it seemed fine. We also did not have our nominees at exactly the right time called for in the Nominations and Elections checklist. These experiences lead our committee to believe that the Nominations and Elections checklist is too conservative and not in keeping with actual CALL practice. Thus, we planned to revise the checklist. However, when we looked at the Nominations and Elections checklist we saw that most of the deadlines came from the CALL Bylaws. Because revising the bylaws is such an incredibly arduous process, we did not think it was worth making an effort to revise them. In a sense, Nominations and Elections committee chairs will have to know informally that the deadlines in the checklist are too conservative.
It was a pleasure to serve as the nominations and elections committee chair this year. Thank you for the opportunity.